How so? Catherine is much more niche than both Persona and Yakuza and its very clear that MS is only interested in Japanese games that could sell big in west. This why they got Code Vein because it very similar to Souls games and Souls games are do well in west and Dragon ball fighterZ because DBZ is huge IP.
I bet you anything the reason they did not try to get NieR Automata because Phil Spencer looked at Yoko Taro's past works and he thought the game review badly and it wont sell like shit.
I have no idea how you got the impression Phil/Microsoft's the one making those decisions but it's really silly. If you look at the actual publishers of those games, there are very clear strategies there.
Bandai Namco are willing to support the Xbox with the games they think will at least sell decently on it (Tekken 7, DBZ, Dark Souls, Code Vein, etc). But games that are far more niche in the west like Tales of, Digimon, etc are off the cards.
Sega are pretty much the same. Though Valkyria Revolution was a weird one, I still have no idea why that came to Xbox but not to PC.
Square Enix Japan, on the other hand, clearly doesn't give a fuck about Xbox. We're talking about a publisher who literally provides the PS4 ten times the amount of support they provide Xbox (30 vs 3). I don't think it matters what Phil wants or thinks, they aren't interested.